70% of Cambodians live on less than $3.20 USD a day.² Most families on our program are among the 10% poorest in their community. Most do not have regular employment. Hunger and food security is often a daily concern.

One illness can upend a family, driving them into serious debt to cover costs.³ (see Microfinance below).

One answer to poverty has been for parents to surrender their children to an orphanage in the hope they’ll receive enough food and an education. But orphanages are an inappropriate response to poverty.⁴ (see Orphanages below).

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child state that children should grow up in a family environment and that priority should be given to support the child’s parents and extended family to enable them to care adequately and to prevent unnecessary separation. Poverty should never be the sole reason for removing a child from their family.⁵

Microfinance, or microcredit, can be defined as ‘the provision of financial services to low-income (or formerly unbanked) populations’.⁶

In a country where 70% live on less than $3.20 USD a day,⁷ it is ludicrous that 2.4 million Cambodians hold a total microloan debt of at least $8 billion USD.⁸ In Cambodia, the average microloan debt per borrower is approximately $3,370 USD, which is the highest average amount in the world.⁹

Many families that Free To Shine work with have microfinance loans, often multiple loans. Few of these families are employed; most do irregular work for a daily wage. Microfinance institutions visit these rural villages regularly offering families loans. The main reasons families on Free To Shine’s program state for accepting these loans are;
• when they needed money for medication they couldn’t afford,
• when they couldn’t find work and needed money for food, and
• when they couldn’t pay existing microfinance loan repayments so took out additional loans to cover existing loans.

Poverty is the reason for most of these microfinance loans. The guarantee for the loan is usually the land they live on, which has often been handed down from their parents.

The inability to pay these loans, with their interest, is the main reason for migration.

When families cannot afford basic healthcare, food and loan repayments on the work they can find locally, many migrate to nearby Thailand, where the daily wage is approximately 3 times that of Cambodia.

In Cambodia, a lack of jobs leads some women and girls to leave their homes in rural areas to try to find work in tourist destination cities. In many cases, traffickers exploit them in sex trafficking, including in massage parlors, karaoke bars, and beer gardens.¹⁰

^‍Debt is a primary driver of migration¹¹ and is responsible for migrants going into exploitative work, making it more difficult for migrants to leave exploitative work, and increasing the likelihood of forced labor.¹²

^‍Thailand is the primary destination country for migration from Cambodia. There are 391,000 Cambodian migrants working in Thailand.^13,14

^‍73% of migrants migrate through irregular channels.¹⁵

^‍Migrating legally incurs greater expense, but affords greater protection and access to services. Families who migrate without the appropriate documentation have reported running from the Thai police, paying weekly bribes to the Thai police, not being able to enrol their children in school, and not being able to access healthcare. Mums still breastfeeding have reported taking their babies and toddlers with them, and an older child approximately 11-12 years old, to care for the babies and toddlers whilst the mums work. These children are usually sent back home to Cambodia to aunts or grandparents when they have finished breastfeeding.

Cambodia’s immigration police states that nearly 14,332 undocumented Cambodians were deported from Thailand in the first quarter of 2017, a 27% increase over the same quarter a year before.¹⁶

^‍Human Rights Watch reported that in Thailand “both registered and unregistered migrant workers complained of physical and verbal abuse, forced overtime and lack of holiday time off, poor wages and dangerous working conditions and unexplained and illegal deductions from their salary”.¹⁷

Free To Shine is committed to best practice. We believe orphanages should be a last resort, and a temporary measure. We are members of Childsafe, Family Care First Cambodia, and ReThink Orphanages.

80 percent of the eight million children living in orphanages globally are not really orphans. They have at least one living parent or family member who could potentially care for them.

Due to financial donations, many orphanages are in a position to provide access to better education than the local village school, leading some families to place their children in an orphanage in the hope of better opportunities.

60 years of International research shows that there are better ways to care for children, which is why orphanages are no longer the preferred model around the world. Yet Cambodia has fallen victim to a huge rise in the orphanage model, in place of providing services that keep families together.

Between 2005 and 2015, Cambodia saw a 60 percent rise in the number of orphanages and residential care facilities.¹⁸ In 2015 there were 254 residential care facilities housing 11,171 children. In 2017 this increased dramatically to 406 institutions housing a total of 16,579 children.¹⁹ To put it in perspective, using Cambodia’s 2015 population numbers, this means approximately 1 in every 350 Cambodian children lives in a residential care facility.²⁰

^‍Many orphanages in Cambodia regularly accept short-term, unqualified visitors, donors or volunteers to teach, supervise or interact with the children. Volunteers typically stay for short periods of time, form bonds with the children and then leave, which can be incredibly disruptive and damaging to the child.

A large number of orphanages and residential care facilities in Cambodia are unregistered or unregulated; 38 percent have never been inspected by the Ministry, 12 percent are not registered by any branch of the government and 21 percent do not have a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the government.²¹ This limits monitoring and other safeguards enacted to protect children and ensure they are not neglected or exploited.

Free To Shine works in partnership with The Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth (MoSAVY), who are committed to returning children to families. When a child cannot stay with their family, Free To Shine seeks to place them in kinship care, with extended relatives.

Visiting or volunteering in orphanages, schools, and communities has become a popular pastime of tourists in Cambodia who are seeking an inside look at Cambodian culture. But would you volunteer at an orphanage in your home country? Would you want strangers visiting your child while they are at school?

You can’t just visit schools in your home town, right? Perhaps you would be welcomed for a tour if you had a legitimate reason, like you were considering enrolling your children there. But you wouldn’t be able to just go to see the children play or watch the teachers teach.

Would you want hundreds of foreign tourists walking around your child’s school every year? Of course not, you’d be concerned, not only for their disrupted education but about the potential risks to their safety and wellbeing. Yet millions of visitors per year want to see children in their schools in Cambodia.

What about tours through your neighbourhood? Would you want tourists peering through your doors and windows during dinnertime, or taking photographs of your children playing in their front yard? We expect a certain level of privacy when in our homes, and this respect for boundaries should be afforded to families in Cambodia too.

Of course, it’s natural to want to see how different cultures and communities live, but it is important you do it in a way that is ethical.

See our factsheet Responsible Travel for more tips and information.

Violence has no place in the family unit and needs to be addressed at all levels, with all family members.

36 percent of Cambodian men reported perpetrating physical and/or sexual violence against a female intimate partner. 50 percent of men who committed rape did so as teenagers.²²

^‍A survey undertaken of 2000 Cambodian men, by four UN agencies, found that almost half of those admitting to perpetrating violence stated that they never faced legal consequences.²³

^‍The Khmer Rouge made every attempt to ban family life and deconstruct familial bonds.²⁴ According to numerous studies, as much as one-third of the population meet the criteria for the Western diagnosis of PTSD.²⁵

^‍With only 1 social worker per 25,000 people in Cambodia there is a scarcity of formal support to address the ongoing, underlying causes of family and domestic violence.

Free To Shine’s social workers have received extensive training in family and domestic violence, safety planning and appropriate interventions. When alerted to violence within a family, a clear process is followed in order to best protect children and alert the proper authorities. Free To Shine’s social workers work with families and communities to minimise risk factors, and increase protective factors, to keep women and children safe.